533000000000=5,33*10^11 - Decimal Powers
Sun, 04/19/2009 - 15:28
Hi
I just bought your app and I'm liking it very much so far. It looks cool, is very intuitive to use and (on contrary to other math apps) really feels like it's meant for the IPhone!
Since i'll use it for my physics studies i've to deal with very large/little numbers most of the time. It would be great if Pi Cubed shows decimal powers (i hope thats the correct phrase, just got it form a dictionary ;)) if the result is larger/smaller than, for example 100000/0.00001. Counting zeros is not that cool :/. If you think that other people are against this feature, you could just add an option where you can turn decimal powers on or off.
second thing: Maybe you could change the way removing square roots is working. If you're typing in a large formula and you choose the wrong root, there is no way to undo this step unless you're deleting everything under the root. (same for exponents - touching the x-Icon has no effect).
I'm looking forward to your future update you mentioned in the other thread. :)
greetings from Austria
Allan
Tue, 04/21/2009 - 13:29
#2
Many iPhone apps have settings that get specified on a page in the Settings app. Why not use such a page to specify the user preferred output display. Personally, I would opt for a standard 6 digit scientific notation display, but there are certainly a wide range of easily accessible formats. In addition, you could make tapping on the result toggle between the user specified display and the display Pi Cubed is using tday, which would be useful on those occasions when the user would want to see a lot of digits.
Tue, 04/21/2009 - 13:55
#3
I was trying to avoid using the Settings application, simply because so few people (including me, sometimes) forget that it's even there. However, there might be a few cases where that could come in handy.
What I had in mind for the answer value was that by tapping on it, you would bring up a menu at the bottom of the screen that would allow you to select between a decimal display and scientific notation (of the 2.2 x 10^4 variety, although typeset like the rest of the exponentials in the application), as well as a slider for the number of significant digits to display in the result. The tricky case is in inputting numbers using scientific notation. I need to refine my input methods for that case.
Yes, scientific notation was one of those things that didn't quite make it in the 1.0 release. I'm working on a clean way to implement it without cluttering up the interface.
As far as the editing difficulties with enclosing operations, that was another thing I held back on for 1.0. However, I'm working on a solution for that where you tap once to select an item, and tap a second time to select just the enclosing operation. That should let you delete accidentally added exponents, roots, trig operations, etc. I hope to have that as part of the next release.